Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/522

 in the morning, a young voyou of about twenty years, "in a brown suit and a black derby-hat," This individual could not be traced; and till now the murder is unpunished. Again in April,1909, was assassinated at Versailles, a certain Madame Barbery, who during many years had kept in the town a regular and widely-known rendezvous for homosexual guests; especially for convenience of clients who affected young soldier-prostitutes of the garrison at Versailles, or for civilists who brought Parisian catamites out to the apartment in the Rue Maurepas. She had a son in the army in Algeria, himself actively homosexual. He sent to his mother numerous regimental and other acquaintances going to Paris on leave, thus adding to her clientage an element increasingly louche, mixed and dangerous. Robbery was the cause of the woman's murder. This matter has not been cleared up as yet.

The fear of a scandal is often accompanied by the final courage to kill the blackmailer. Homicide—often long and carefully premeditated murder—is a kind peculiarly in key with an aristocratic and high-class desperation; with crime that is the effort of the uranian to be free of persecution. Blackmailed or otherwise menaced by scandal, his means and hopes exhausted, he takes the law in his hands. Strange "mysteries" of blood, or murderous crimes not involved in mystery, occur where some overwrought man has reached the point of "turning," with pistol or knife or poison in hand. One greatly discussed crime in France, many years ago, still is a model of this species. Another bloody family-tragedy in England, a very few years ago, was due to the fact that the homosexual criminal was in almost insane despair.

A most complicated affair came in New York City, some half-a-dozen years back, in a smart club. It involved two poisonings, with fatal results. It was a drama of